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In northwest lower Michigan, just finished my first year teaching here and this month of June 08 has been quite a month so far...living in my truck on the beaches of beautiful Lake Michigan...and I'm wholy dependent on Almighty God: living, breathing, dreaming each new day in His strength.
Happy Father's Day, dad. I love you.
This morning I found myself down at a public beach reading and decided I needed a little walk to refresh myself...I had seen a real old guy jogging down the beach yestreday and it made me feel pretty lazy. I started south at about 8:30 and the sun hadn't yet climbed over the beautiful bluffs overlooking the beach to my left. After walking 3500 steps (beach steps, mind you), I began to see strange cloud formations out over the Lake to the southwest. What made me turn around and start heading back to the truck was the low runbling of distant thunder, now increasing in frequency. The strange clouds approached the coast way too fast and I found myself jogging now to try to beat the storm.
I must say right here that I'm not quite what an educated person would cal 'fit'. I've lost some weight in the last year or so but I enjoy smoking and watching tv, neither of which truly contribute to a healthy lifestyle. So this little run I embarked on hurt. It hurt my feet (bare, in the sand), it hurt my shins, it hurt my knees; even breathing (inhale three strides, exhale three strides, like Steve Kalita taught me in high school) hurt. Keeping my mouth closed to avoid collecting any number of beachbugs in my esophagus made it even more difficult. When I felt comfortable with the distance-to-truck/distance-from-storm ratio (which seemed to be increasing even at my fleetest pace), I would walk for a bit to catch my breath. But the thunder kept rumbling and the weird clouds (http://www.missouriskies.org/roll_cloud/roll_cloud.html, for some pictures that weren't my weird clouds but someone elses looking just like mine) kept on coming so I resumed my trot until I saw the familiar 'Public Beach ends here' signs which marked the end of my brief journey. Back at the truck, I removed three sweaty t-shirts to put on one dry one and watched as the 'roll' clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis) moved over the shore and inland. This to me was an amazing sight; it could have been from a sci-fi thriller on the same level as the huge ships over citys in Independence Day. There was no death or destruction though, only a slight drop in temperature and a significant increase in wind speed. When the second, not-so-well-defined roll cloud came inland, I noticed both of those changes again. But there was no real nasty storm right behind it as I had anticipated. I could see rain out over the lake both northwest of me and southwest of me but the wind remained gusty where I was with more typical gray storm clouds overhead. I decided I needed NexRad urgently to let me know what was coming.
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